As to the 32 to 64 bit comparison. I didn't notice any difference performance-wise at all. My lag was the same as it is on live. I already run on maxed graphics so no change at all for me.

Finally got onto the PTS to look at this. These changes will do nothing to combat inflation but will most definitely make the low level game tedious. Running the 4 Coruscant heroics with a lvl 80 Sentinel in 330 gear resulted in a repair bill of 10,178 credits but the credit yield (including selling "junk" dropped by the mobs) was 117,498 credits (and my bank on that character alone is 96 million) so those repair costs are meaningless to that character (and to any character that is high level or has a lot of credits available through legacy). Even these higher costs are insignificant in relation to the number of credits already in the game. The only thing these changes are going to do is hurt new players and casual players that don't have the credits from a high level alt to fall back on. They will find themselves constantly short of credits for repairing their gear or traveling. People complained for years about how long it took to get across some planets on a speeder and these changes will only increase the number of people that have to do that instead of using quick travels from the boondocks back to civilization. The game needs to encourage people to play the game not drive them away with petty credit charges and annoying popups. I stand by the recommendations above. The travel costs need to be reworked and the repair costs should be abandoned since they will have no effect on the number of credits in the game which is what causes the high prices on the GTN (not the influx of credits which is tiny in comparison). Forcing all trades back onto the GTN (and finding a way to tax the billions of credits traded for sales runs) would be a much more effective credit sink . The casual players who these changes will most affect are not buying and selling things worth billions of credits nor making enough credits to appreciably affect the influx of credits. Most are getting just enough credits to get by with repairs as it is. You have got to put a stop to people buying and selling credits with real money or all these changes will be pointless.

Finally got it to work with a complete reinstall of the game (retail and PTS) along with setting launcher to administrator mode and doing a registry clean before reinstalling. Reinstalling the PTS alone didn't work.

This is the one that would have the biggest impact on draining credits from the game. It is the existence of huge storehouses of credits on just a few players that keeps prices where they are. If people have hundreds of billions of credits, anyone selling something even remotely valuable is going to inflate the price to get the biggest return knowing there is someone out there able to and willing to pay the price. In my opinion, there are two different issues. High prices on the GTN caused by a glut of credits in the game (the bigger of the two problems) and inflation which is related to credit influx. Bioware has reduced rewards multiple times over the last couple of years (reducing heroic credit payouts, removing credits from GS objectives, lowering mission rewards again, and now travel expense). These have had no impact on prices on the GTN, if anything prices have gone up since these credit limiting methods were implemented.

you mean the effort of posting in Fleet Chat over and over Last time I checked, paying taxes has nothing to do with the effort of selling something. Whether I sell it on an auction site, sell it door to door, or at a garage sale, I pay the same amount of tax on the money made

These are what Bioware should have dealt with first instead of nickle and diming casual players to death. In the business vernacular, these are "low hanging fruit". Big impact for relatively little effort (especially the GTN circumvention). One sale circumventing the GTN tax is equivalent to hundreds of players travelling all day even with the current silly high travel costs that have been proposed. As long as outside GTN trades are allowed, the GTN can't do it's job of removing credits. You do also have to crack down on alternate currencies like hypercrates or people will just use those in trade instead of credits. Sales runs exchange billions of credits and yet pay not a dime of "taxes"

Since I can't actually test this out on the PTS because Bioware has yet to fix the blank server screen problem (or even comment on it for weeks) I'll offer this advice if you are dead set on charging travel costs. 1) Use of your personal starship and on planet speeder (taxi) should have no cost. 2) Quick Travel on planet should have the same cost as the speeders (taxis) do now 3) Priority Transports (from your Activity Panel) should have the same costs as the current costs for traveling by ship 4) Priority Transports from the Fleet should be slightly higher (25%) compared to the costs of Priority Transports from your activity panel (extra red tape, docking fees, etc) 5) Legacy Perk purchased priority transports should have no cost 6) going to your stronghold or fleet from anywhere should have no cost 7) going from your stronghold to a planet should have the same cost as going there by your personal ship (if a Priority Transport Fee doesn't apply). 9) travel costs should apply to flashpoints, operations, and PVP zones and should be the same as the travel by Priority Transport to a planet of similar distance. Had to skip 8 because it kept converting to a smiley face emote

And the guy who had the New Coke idea got fired.

On this note, some of us can't even get on the PTS because we get a blank server select screen. This issue has persisted since the onset of the 64-bit PTS rollout and has had almost no comment from Bioware. Please fix this issue so we can actually see how the new taxes work

While this is true, reducing the influx of credits only prevents the prices from going higher. It does absolutely nothing to bring them down into a range an average player can afford. The cause of the high prices (which is what almost everyone complaining has complained about) is separate from "inflation". High prices are caused entirely by the vast majority of credits (whether gained legitimately or illegitimately) being in a few players hands allowing them to buy out "rare" items on the GTN to resell them at a much higher price. What is needed is a way to make these items more available or a way to make it less desirable to buy them out and stockpile them.

This is a very concerning scenario. Back in the "olden" days, this was an issue. You would have to fight mobs to get the credits to repair your gear all the while taking more damage to it. This was the least fun part of the game (right alongside having to complete every mission on the planet and then having to farm mobs to get to be high enough level to advance to the next planet). As I said in a previous post, this feels more like a means to slow people down in progressing through content than any serious attempt at "fixing" the economy.

Agreed, no one thing is going to get things under control. It is going to take a combination of things and someone with a devious mind to sort out how any new system could be abused, because players will find a way to abuse it, if they can. I think the donation mechanic, combined with 1 trade only hypercrates and limited trades of other CM items could be a good core mechanic. There are obviously some drawbacks that would need to be sorted out and some loopholes to close, but I think it is a better way to attack inflation (which is really high prices at this point due to massive numbers of credits already in the game rather than the "influx" of credits) than the proposed changes. I think the credit sinks proposed by Bioware are alright, with some adjustments (it almost seems like these changes are designed to slow down progress through the game rather than combat inflation)

As another thought, this could also be dealt with by allowing a "donation" mechanic, where the items can be given to another player if one player doesn't put anything into the trade window. Or there could be an exception for trades within the guild (with some limitations)

How about just applying it to hypercrates then, sort of like what was done in GS? The hypercrate can be traded once but once opened, the items inside can be traded multiple times (though I would still like to see some kind of limit to keep them from being used to launder credits). That still lowers their value as a commodity while increasing the supply of the items "held" within. I'm not sure that is enough limitation, but trying that wouldn't cause you issues with your door prizes. CM items are the core of the inflationary issues due to their extremely limited supply and allowing people to buy up all of them on the market to horde them drives up the price.

Gold sellers are still a problem that needs to be dealt with (more specifically, the people who sell credits to them need to be dealt with), the GTN increase is only if trades of CM items outside the GTN is blocked (or severely limited). It shouldn't be implemented without that caveat. If you are using them as door prizes, isn't the intent that who you give them to uses them. I don't see how limiting trading to one trade cripples that in any way.

That vid is from 6 years ago. With 7.0 came quite a few changes that unbalanced most of the KoTFE and KoTET "boss" fights (they were originally designed for much more powerful characters and were never toned down with the weakening of the player characters and the companions). You need to be very good at playing your class to get by with 236 armor now. Companions were also reduced significantly with 7.0 so you need a higher influence companion to get the same output you got back then. I'd recommend you buy a couple pieces of entry level conquest gear from the fleet vendor to bump up your item rating and get your companion's influence to 30 or higher.

Except for the first jump (my house to the local node), they differ from day to day so yes I have checked out the path. The path to the PTS is the same for one of the other cloud server platforms I use (when checked on the same day) except for the last jump to the final server. That was why I discounted the internet connection.

Want to get inflation under control. Start with Cartel Market items 1: Make them tradeable (whether player to player, guild to player, or via GTN) only once, after that they are bound to legacy. Then if you want to sell a hypercrate, you have to open it and sell the items inside (once again tradeable only once). This will drive down the value of hypercrates (since they can't be hoarded effectively or used as an alternate currency) as well as driving down the price of the items they contain because of increased supply. 2: Block all trades of cartel market items from player to player trades (between legacies, leave trades within the legacy). Allow donation to other characters by allowing player to player trades where one of the two players puts nothing into the trade window with the same limitation as above (item becomes bound to legacy when traded) 3: with the blocking of Cartel Market item trades, increase the GTN cap to 4 billion credits so they can be sold on the GTN. 4: Add additional levels of tax (luxury tax) to items sold for more than 1 billion credits on the GTN. Nickle and diming the average player isn't going to do anything when a lot of the people sitting on all those credits aren't playing the game anyway (and thus would not be impacted at all by these changes). The only thing this system will guarantee is that no one will ever be able to attain the level of credits needed to buy the high ticket items (those will remain the domain of the super rich who will keep trading them back and forth with each other to launder credits). Edit: One other thing about the QT/Stronghold costs. There are a number of missions, particularly in the later expansions, that are broken and you need to use quick travel or travel to A stronghold to "fix" them since they have not had their code fixed (ie Ruins of Null and the Manaan droid mission). You are charging people for using the workarounds you suggested for these missions. That seems blatantly unfair (not to mention the instant kill bugs that will cost you repair costs because of the broken code)

Well, tried this again with the update and once again only a blank server list. The issue clearly hasn't been fixed. I have eliminated everything except for the PTS software and the specific server it connects to. The existing computer (64-bit architecture and 64-bit operating system along with high speed fiber optic internet) has no problem running other "new" (within the last 3-6 months) 64-bit software or connecting to cloud (including other AWS servers). Turning the firewall and antivirus off do not make a difference so there is no blockage of any component going on at the PC. That pretty much leaves the PTS software itself and the server the PTS connects to as the only remaining unknowns. This continues to be a problem for quite a few people based on posts in this thread and it is disappointing that there has been no comment by Bioware on a problem that will cause people to leave the game once the new 64-bit version drops (I can't think of anyone that would replace a perfectly functional computer just to play one game). If this is an unfixable issue it would be nice if Bioware would state that so people with the issue can migrate away from the game rather than just having it end suddenly (potentially losing months of sub time that was paid for in advance).

So this makes it alright. They did it before so it's OK to do it now. Personally I don't see a difference. It was reportable before and it is reportable now in my opinion. Virtually all of the players jumping in know exactly what is going to happen and it is their selfishness that causes the problem (as you stated, they want to start their quest and don't care that they have broken someone else's). Instead of waiting their turn, they'd rather ruin someone else's ability to complete the quest (they are once per day aren't they or is it once per week). At least if you die doing that quest, you don't have to wait until the next day to try again (nothing wrong with helping someone about to die, though it's unlikely you'll actually be successful unless you are healing them). I think you are giving people the benefit of the doubt (that they really want to help) when that is mostly unjustified. It is all about selfishness. I am fine with most of the way shared tagging works (for the general kill X NPC quests) but it should be modified when dealing with mobs that have required drops/outcomes to complete an objective. People complain all the time about how there is no challenge in the game, but when someone wants to add challenge by using a "weaker" character, it is somehow alright for some super overpowered player to come in and blow away the mob because he is "helping". Another mission that comes to mind where "shared tagging" is a negative is the Alderaan quest where you are supposed to capture a killik joiner. That doesn't work out so well when someone trying to get X kills jumps in and slaughters everything in sight (this wasn't a problem pre-7.0 because no one jumped in because they got nothing out of it). Overall Shared Tagging is fine. It just needs a few tweaks to take care of the abuses that have developed

The example given was the Bounty Hunter event. Jumping in causes the player who started the fight to have to begin the quest all over again (which is why I said you should know what the impact is before jumping in) if they are trying to capture instead of kill. I am not talking about the Kill X NPC missions or the Rampages (the shared tagging is fine for those). So I disagree with both you and Darcmoon on shared tagging being a positive for that mission (it's clearly a negative). Perhaps they could turn of shared tagging for mobs off that type. A simple fix for the objects would be to give them instant respawn but block you from clicking on the same one more than once per "old" respawn. It is a shared enviroment and you should consider it to be the same as in real life. Would you push someone out of the way to get what you want, probably not. You should treat the game the same way. Object ninja-ing is more than annoying it is flat out rude (though there is little you can do about it which is why it continues to go on.

It's pretty much a textbook example of harassment

There are a few events and objectives where "helping" is actually detrimental (best to know what the result of your joining is before jumping in since its not always positive). What they should do is make anyone entering the combat area not be able to use any of the clickable objectives until after the fight is over, giving the person who started the fight to get the objective at least some chance of getting what they were fighting for. When an NPC needs to drop an item to complete the questline, I have seen people help out, and the person who started the fight not getting the drop. It doesn't happen consistently so there is a bug somewhere or it is using the "killing" blow to determine who gets the drop. Face Merchants was this way on the PTS (pre-7.0) and I have encountered situations where you get drops from the mob but not the required item, but the other person who joined in does get the needed item. If you ask someone not to "help" and they keep jumping in, that is a reportable offense. Just make sure you have evidence that you asked them when you submit the report.

True, although starting with the second season, "real" PVPers will start to pull away as far as the "good" stuff goes since they will have a lot more of the tokens available..

Because they are desirable which makes them a good credit sink. Evidently the GS credit sink is working in Bioware's estimation, so they added it to a "rarer" token